Things read, watched and played

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl 1: Good naturedly silly comic about a girl with the POWER OF SQUIRRELS balancing the start of college with saving the world from various random supervillains. Written by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. She isn't sexualised at all which is nice, and there's understated but pervasive diversity.

Games:

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: I played some of this when it came out on the Wii 10 years ago (!) but got stuck early on and was always sad I couldn't see how it ended. So I started watching the first result that came up on a search for a 'Let's Play' and have been really enjoying it. The LPer, batman9502, is a little dorkily earnest but is enthusiastic and good natured, stopping to point out things he thinks are adorable or odd, and is relatively low on the offensiveness scale (eg he mildly makes fun of fat or "weird" characters but doesn't use slurs or ogle the female characters even when the game invites it) He's being very thorough so it's 115 videos, I tune the boring dungeons out but it's a cute fantasy story with an interesting aesthetic and watching someone competently solve all the challenges while explaining what he's doing is weirdly satisfying. I'm at video 81 so the end is approaching! What drew me to this game particularly is that it has a slightly Tim Burton-y dark/weird aesthetic, though it's mainly a straightforward Japanese RPG. The female sidekick is delightfully strange though she's become more of a conventional JRPG female character personality wise as the story has progressed.

Reflections of Life: Tree of Dreams: enjoyably shallow girly chosen one fantasy hidden object game. Well, enjoyable for me, ymmv, it's really not very good on an objective level. Have not *quite* finished yet but am very close. I am edging ever closer to drafting an email to Big Fish games about racism and cultural appropriation/exotification though this one isn't as bad as some.

Mystic Messenger: Freemium phone based dating sim where your character stumbles into a chat room for a group of friends and becomes friends with them and I guess tries to organise a party and solve a mystery? I didn't get very far, the chats happen during set time intervals during the day and worrying about missing one took the fun out of things. Plus it kept making my old-ish iPhone crash. It seemed cute in a mainstream dating sim kinda way, and being obviously set in Korea helped me think of the main character as Not Me (I do not want to date conventional minded guys in their early 20s as me) There's a female character with her own route, I am assuming friendship. Having emails from the characters arrive in your 'inbox' was cute, and the chat mechanic was interesting. Someone should make a Homestuck version! If you do play it, start early in the day or you'll miss a bunch of chats.

Urgh, Big Fish and their weird cultural stereotypes, appropriation, and so forth. I've been playing 'Gummy Drop' long enough that I've been to one Australian, one Asian, two USA, and three European cities, and some of the characters are much closer to caricatures.

Mind you, one thing I learnt recently is that Big Fish aren't a company producing games, but some kind of marketing hub. I didn't look further though, but my guess is that they aren't necessarily applying any kind of 'appropriateness' filter to the games that they distribute.

Twilight Princess! I watched my brother play about half of that and helped him with one of the puzzles but never finished it since the wolf section in the beginning made me too anxious at the time. I love that Let's Plays let you get into games that you can't beat yourself now. The aesthetic is very unusual for the Zelda series but it works so well and I appreciate Midna is mostly in her stranger form for most of it.